So I’ve been writing computer programmes since I was 12 years old. It was the early 80’s, the days of the ZX81, Spectrum and the BBC micro. In those days “programming” actually meant copying lines of code from computer magazines, probably in some flavour of the Basic computer language, into whichever machine you had access to. In my case it was a Commodore Vic 20 my parents had bought me one Christmas, after I had visited a friends dad’s accountancy business one Sunday afternoon and been fascinated by his WANG, no really that was the make of their computer, just be careful when you Google it! Anyway my friend could make this thing display his name over and over again across the screen.
10 Print "Matt is Soooo Coool ";
20 Goto 10
The semi-colon is significant, otherwise you got a single column of the assertion that "Matt is Cool" rather than having it splashed across the whole screen. Incidentally, it should come as no surprise to learn that Matt wasn't very cool then, nor is he very cool now, but he is a great bloke and still one of my closest friends all these years later!
Needless to say I was hooked. Immediately. If you had asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up that morning I would have said “I want to be a Doctor”. Ask me again that evening and it was “I’m going to be a computer programmer”. Luckily for me that’s exactly what happened and I’ve managed to have a decent career at various different levels of seniority and made a reasonable living doing exactly what I have wanted to do since the age of 12.
However, I’ve only ever written business stuff. On my CV there are facilities management applications and personnel systems, quotation systems and selling platforms. Don’t get me wrong, all very necessary, rewarding even but not the sort of stuff you can get really excited about. I’ve always harboured an ambition to develop games but it’s never really presented itself as an opportunity for me. In those early days of home computing, indie programmers could develop a game in their bedrooms and sell it for serious money. They’d do the graphics, the sound and write the code joining it all together, but by the time I was starting my programming career, games were becoming big business with the big budgets to match and the humble indie developers started to drift into ”normal” programming jobs. Don’t be surprised if there’s some bald bloke in your IT department who happened to write a best selling spectrum game in his bedroom when he was 14 or 15. You’ll be able to spot him, he won’t be wearing a wedding ring!
Anyway, in 2008 that all changed with the launch of Apple’s App Store and Android Market (now Google Play). Suddenly indie developers had the tools to write programmes and make them available to large audiences without having to spend a fortune, if you discount remortgaging to buy an Apple phone to test on that is. Once more we had stories of the kid who wrote a game in his bedroom in a couple of weeks, in-between homework and squeezing his spots (or other popular pastime for teenage boys), that had trillions of downloads and made him a millionaire overnight. I dare say some of them are true, but for every one that did make a fortune there are no doubt countless thousands that didn’t.
Still, there now exists an environment in which the indie programmer can write a game, hopefully get it published on the App Store, and assuming enough people download it to generate at least a penny in advertising revenue, can make a valid claim to be a games developer. Well, that’s my assertion anyway so with best foot forward and all that, I'm going to do exactly that, and blog about the resulting journey.
Labels: ambition, bucket list, computer, game development, programming